Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Some people get their kicks from braving a mob of blood-crazed shoppers to attack the nearest mannequin. But if that doesn’t appeal, why not exact virtual revenge? Keith emails to inform of one of the very best things online: a little feature over at ConsumerReports.org called the ‘Crash Test Selector’. It’s a series of films showing latest-model cars equipped with latest-model crash-test dummies being crashed into barriers and rammed side on by robot vehicles. The ‘Crash Test Selector’ is exactly that: you can pick and chose from latest model cars – the Mini Cooper, the new VW Beatle, Mercedes, Lincolns, Volvos – and compare the results. Clearly the dummies fare better in the Audis and they are clearly worse off in convertibles. Lesson learnt.
These films are state of the art. The cinematography is superb. Crashes are filmed from the front, from the side, from inside, in slow motion, as well as at normal speed. My favourite is the view from inside the passenger compartment. Shot in slow-motion, high-definition closeup, we watch shards of glass and ruptured rear-view mirrors fly directly towards the camera lens as the dummies loll about helplessly. It’s as if the car is a space vehicle that has blown its airlock, the slo-mo vacuum of the black hit of space sucking the ship’s debris and its inhabitants into the infinite and beyond. True inner-space poetry.
Keith says, ‘This is totally Ballardian, especially if you own a car. It’s rather disturbing to watch what could be you being smashed over and over, in increasingly close-up shots and from different angles. It also helps give those of us who are jaded a reminder why Crash was such a powerful book.’
Keith is absolutely right: it is a forceful reminder of the power of Crash, at a time when the mainstreaming of extreme violence is at a peak with the current popularity of ‘torture porn’. But for me, the ambivalence of Crash is the really disturbing factor. I’ve been in a side-on car crash that managed to spin the vehicle around and also destroy the front of the car. I’ll never forget looking down at my legs, and then up at the concertinaed bonnet, thinking that just another few inches would have wiped out my lower half altogether. Still, I respond to the dark beauty at the core of these crash-test films.
There’s something sinister in the relentless camera work, a kind of code. The dummy is the ideal metaphor for Ballard’s posthuman protagonists, with its passive expression, its willingness to be experimented on. The complete collapse of time and space I experienced during my crash — the classic dilation of time reported by many crash victims, with everything in slow motion — oozes from these films, a warm, comforting complicitness in the manufacture of my own death. As Ballard says, ‘Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? … Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality? … If we really feared the car crash, none of us would ever be able to drive a car.’
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The films are introduced by Jeff Bartlett from Consumer Reports, a bland anchor man with a slicked-back semi-mullet, a stonewall expression, and the tones of an insurance salesman. He talks about the ‘energy of the impact’, the ‘driver’s survival space’, the ‘integrity of the passenger compartment’, ‘head accelerations’, and each film ends with a sound effect – a ‘boing’ – like it’s an ad for pain relief. Meanwhile, you hear the screeching of tyres and brakes. You see the airbags released, smothering the driver-dummy like an all-enveloping, amniotic sac. The dummy’s head, smeared with makeup, leaves a bright red patch on the airbag, indicating the point of impact as sensors inside the mock human transmit the likely damage to internal organs and external tissue.
Could you project a fantasy onto these bland, affectless protagonists (perhaps including Jeff Bartlett, although I’m really talking about the dummies here)? Could you imagine the red makeup as spurting blood and brain tissue? Given the absolute seductive nature of the cinematography, and the utter helplessness of the victims, could you project, if you were so inclined, a sexual fantasy onto these poor helpless dummies?
Yes you could — if your name is ‘Eli Roth’.
I recently read a Sight & Sound review of Hostel that compared its plot to ‘something out of Ballard’, but Roth has completely elided the clinical, critical distance Ballard inserts into his work. Instead of watching the atrocity with the flat gaze of a surgeon, we now view it from inside the mind of a serial killer. As Roger Luckhurst has noted of Crash, ‘Ballard’s affectless, monologic style … absents itself from making any conclusion about the thesis it remorselessly restates page after page, and this makes it the classic instance of what Roland Barthes termed the “scriptible” text — that is, a text that has to be actively completed, to be almost cowritten by the reader if any sense of meaning or closure is to be reached (Cronenberg repeated the effect in the film by resisting explanatory voice-over or the subjective point of view).’
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
- LEFT: Jeff Bartlett Presents CrashTest Selector. RIGHT: Eli Roth Presents Hostel.
For Eli Roth, that could never be enough. And so his real-life actors and actresses play the role of the crash-test dummy as Roth performs his unspeakable perversions on them, which he also forces on us, forcing the camera to become our subjective POV, so that they become our perversions. Like the high-tech serial killer in Strange Days, we are made to see what Roth sees as he tortures us to death. For this is the man, after all, who is on the record as saying, ‘We’re in a really violent wave and I hope it never ends. Hopefully we’ll get to a point where there are absolutely no restrictions on any kind of violence in movies … I’d love to see us get to a point where you can make a movie and not worry about the limits of the violence. Then I think they’d get so violent that people would get bored of it.’
To compare him with Ballard in any way, shape, or form, therefore, is an enormous miscarriage of justice.
No, I much more prefer the stylised hyperreality of Ballard and Crash (and the gentle ebb and flow of Jeff Bartlett and his harem of enigmatic plastic mannequins) than I do the snuff porn of Eli Roth. And ultimately, if or when my mind wanders into its darkest corners, projecting whatever fantasies are dredged up onto the blank, passive repose of the crash-test dummy, I will find I only have myself to blame for the shock and confusion I feel — rather than suffering the shame of being violated by the fantasies of strangers forced upon me against my will.